My River's Been Dammed Up
by sctwilightvampwolfgal
Summary: They took her just as easily as they took my father before her and Marinette before her. They never stop. *Inspired by the Page 63 Challenge by yellow 14 on the Miraculous Challenges Forum.*


Laughter tickles the back of my throat though this isn't really as funny as I wished it was.

Dread would pool in my belly if I let it, but I refused to think too much of it, to let it manifest itself in my heart and in my mind.

I loved her, but love is such a funny thing in this day and age, and I don't understand it. The thought of just how much I love her or how I love her as never manifested itself in my mind. I think of her a lot like I thought of the dog we used to have, like family but yet a little more. I think of her as steady and yet as fleeting as that was.  
She truly is a part of me in her own way, and I shift, letting my fingers curl into fists, bigger than any that her hands would have made.

"Juleka, honey, don't worry." My mother only calls me by pet names when I feel distant to her or when she feels that she must comfort me in some way. My pain must have been obvious on my face even among the laughter.

"She'll be back. Aren't we always?" Luka asks, but I can never live like him, always the calm neutral to my tempest of emotions, and I wonder how he can manage to survive like this when they took Marinette just a year ago. Then again, he has the whispers, the rumors, of the fact that she might just come back again.

I don't even have that, "They didn't take you, Luka." His name spills forth from my tongue, soft as a drop, and I want to cry even though I won't. My family is hard like the stones you find at the shore next to a running river; they can be broken, but you have to try really hard. We sort of go with the flow in our own ways, but we usually get attached to the river, our individual rivers, somewhere along the way. Rose was mine; Marinette was fast becoming Luka's. Mom's was Dad even though she hasn't spoken of him in years, and we haven't seen him in so long.

We're not as tight knit as the Dupain-Chengs were when their daughter was back home, but we're not as desolate as the Agrestes have been since the mother was taken away. Hawkmoth just wants her back, and no one let's the world know that they have a guess now of who Hawkmoth might be. His pain is as obvious and real to anyone who has lost someone like we have.

Ladybug's gone now, has been for about a year now, and I know what that means even though no one will speak the damning words. Cat Noir still searches for her, and Luka despite all of his charades where he tries to seem calm, misses her. He knows too.

Rose was my best friend, my river that never stopped moving, never stopped flowing, but she was curious and accidentally spoke often enough to let those words slip out, the questions that you can never ask. I miss her, but that isn't enough to explain everything.

Rose was kind to everyone, to anyone, and she never gave up hope on anyone in need, and most of all, she never gave up on me.

She asked once, what it was like to live with a broken family from my father being taken, and I'd told her, it was a lot like when a river is closed up by a dam, a certain kind of energy lost.

Rose had told me that I should write about it, that my words would become like poetry to the people's ears, but I don't have the gift that she sees in me, saw in me. My words are broken and fractured; they lose their way easily and become a mess on the page.

Rose never saw the mess, just every little perfect imperfection; she saw words that got meaning from who wrote them when not everyone will know me or who I am personally. They'll just see words, half as broken to nearly as broken as I am. You can't mask nearly enough with words and yet they aren't quite a diary to how I feel. Nothing can convey even that much.

Rose would argue that I, Juleka Couffaine, likes words, but on the contrary, I hate them like the blood that never stops flowing in my veins, in my vessels. Words suck, because somewhere in the middle, I fall to the wayside, and they tell too much and yet not enough.

I don't want people to see my heart, to see someone underneath the surface, and yet that was never enough to keep the words from forming pictures of who I am in someone else's mind.


End file.
